My breath stops.
It can’t be.
But I know that nose. That mouth. Those hands. The tilt of her chin when she’s defying me.
“Bring him to me. Now!”
The messenger is before me in half a heartbeat.
“Where did you get this?” My voice is ice. My fingers convulse around the picture, torn between ripping it apart and worshipping every pixel of it.
“The contact in Tuscany,” the short, overweight man whispers. “Said she was seen in Florence. Three nights ago.”
Florence.
Holy ground for art and debauchery alike. And the last place on earth I ever thought to find her.
The photograph trembles between my fingers before I give into the the rage and crush it into my palm. My mind fractures under the weight of it—two and a half centuries of rage colliding with something older, darker.
Even more treacherous.
Hope.
But hope curdles quickly when mixed with jealous rage.
She’s alive. After all these years, she’salive.
Existing separate and apart from me.
While I merely endure, a half-shadow, half-memory, rotting beautifully beneath eternity’s indifferent gaze, a ghost who still bleeds for a heartbeat that no longer answers mine.
A low snarl escapes me. The glass shatters in my grip, blood and wine streaking across my wrist.
Jean flinches backward.
“Prepare the jet,” I order. “We leave before dawn.”
“Yes,monsieur.”
When he’s gone, dragging the soon-to-be-rich messenger behind him, I sink into the chair before the fire, gripping the photograph until it cuts into my skin.
Why now? Why surface after centuries?
I think of her unaged face, of how impossible it is for a mortal to defy time itself. Magic, then. Old, potent magic. The kind that leaves scars on the soul.
I should be relieved. She’s alive.
I should feel anticipation or something close to it; the thrill of taking her apart piece by agonising piece, the way I did with her chosen coven while she answers for her wrongs and betrayals.
Instead, jealousy floods my veins like acid.
Who the fuck kept her alive?
Whose protection allowed her to live while I rotted in damnation?
Has she belonged to another all this time? Fucked and worshipped and happy?
The questions burn until I can’t sit still.
